Did any of the fans who claimed this for years or any of those developers who obviously suffer from Alzheimer's disease actually have a look at the in-game animation?

Attachment:

Yoshi.png [ 3.67 KiB | Viewed 1269 times ]

Frame 4 clearly proves that Mario is not punching Yoshi.If Mario's arm movement is supposed to be a motion where his fist goes down on Yoshi's head/eye and Yoshi lowers his head as a result of the impact, then why do we see Mario's arm next to Yoshi's head in that frame?

If you only saw frames 1-3 and 5, then this might be interpreted as Mario punching Yoshi on the head. But Frame 4 shows that Mario's hand and Yoshi's head are on a completely different position of the z-axis.

So, why does this guy suddenly claim that Mario punching Yoshi was always the intention?

It might simply be that intention and execution we see here differed. I mean, it's a process between having a conversation on what something should do and then actually make it so. Somewhere along the line, anyone could've broken in and said "you know what, that doesn't look/feel to good".

Then why don't they clearly say it like that? "We originally intended Mario to punch Yoshi, but then we decided against it. In the current setup, Mario is not punching Yoshi."Especially when Mario punching Yoshi is an actual fan theory.

Quote:

However, the set up that I drew was that when Mario punches Yoshi in the head, the character’s tongue shoots out in surprise.

No it doesn't. This could easily be a result of animating Mario and Yoshi separately and not bothering to sync the animations perfectly.

And how do you explain Yoshi already sticking out his tongue before the impact if the idea is that Mario punches Yoshi to make him stick out his tongue? Let me guess: They didn't bother to synchronize the Yoshi sprite with the tongue sprite.

thefox wrote:

Frankly, I think the original developer's statement is a much more convincing proof than what the animations look like frame-by-frame.

Mario is not a plumber.

Mario is 25 years old.

The Koopalings are not Bowser's children.

Originally, we wanted Mario to ride a cloud. This vision was finally realized 30 years later. (Not six years later in "Super Mario World", no. "Super Mario Maker" was the game where this debuted.)

Darth Vader was always supposed to be Luke's father.

What the developer originally had in mind means jack shit. Only what's in the final work is canon.

When the Simpsons were conceived, they originally thought about Homer being secretly Krusty. But this idea was abandoned before the show even started. So, does this mean that Krusty the Klown is canonically Homer Simpson now because someone played around with that thought for five minutes?

The original artwork of Amy, the character from my game "City Trouble", had a belly button piercing. Then I found out that belly button piercings were only populated in the early 90s while our game was designed as a 1986 game. That's why we removed it for the final sprite and artworks.

So, does Amy have a belly button piercing or doesn't she have one? What weights more? The official artworks that actually went onto the box and into the game. Or some idea that existed for two weeks?

thefox wrote:

(Did Hino even draw the final graphics?)

Doesn't matter. The in-game graphics and the official artworks show Mario not hitting Yoshi. (In frame 4 and 5, they even remove the outline of the fist in one place, to allude to Mario pointing with his finger.)

According to Tezuka, Shigeru Miyamoto said he wanted Mario to ride a horse. “I think he likes horses,” Tezuka added. “When we were making [Super Mario Bros. 3], he drew a picture of Mario riding a horse and had put it up on wall next to where he sits. When I saw that, I thought, ‘I guess he wants Mario to ride something.’ So, when we were making Super Mario World, we had this ‘dinosaur land’ concept, and I had Hino draw reptile type art.”

“Initially,” Hino said, “the keyword that I had was ‘horse,’ so I imagined something quite later and, for the time being, drew a large lizard type creature.”

“It looked like a crocodile,” explained Tezuka, who felt like a reptile-looking creature might seem out of place in Mario. Tezuka drew a rough sketch of a cute character and on the basis of that, Hino created Yoshi.

Sure, that's where the concept of Yoshi came from: It was at the time of SMB3 when Miyamoto drew Mario on a horse. And this idea then evolved through a lizard into a dinosaur.

It sure has nothing to do with the fact that Mario riding a dinosaur was already planned for SMB1 where the character already had a striking similarity to the final image of Yoshi:

Attachment:

Yoshi-concept.png [ 45.18 KiB | Viewed 1254 times ]

No, no, that one had nothing to do with it. Not at all. They didn't just take their old idea from 1985 and put it into SMW.

No, no, the idea of Yoshi came to be at the time of SMB3 and it was originally supposed to be a horse that was only turned into a dinosaur as they went along.

It's a mere coincidence that the final concept of Yoshi equals something that was already designed for SMB1.

I wrote the following before realising I was replying to a 3 year old post, but I'll post it anyway, since I think it's an interesting subject:

rainwarrior wrote:

Sometimes developers will say something in an interview which gets misunderstood or taken out of context, and later repeated incorrectly, eventually distorting the initial idea into some unrecognizable and untrue piece of inane trivia.

Absolutely. It's easy to say that Yoshi was dropped from SMB3 due to "hardware limitations" when the real issue is a much more complex weighing of features and compromises regarding both game design and graphics. It's not like the NES wouldn't be able to handle mario riding a dinosaur.In fact people tend to often really underestimate what the NES is really capable of. And the SNES for that matter.

Yeah, that's also something that I totally hate: "Due do hardware limitations." Why don't they simply say "Because we couldn't get everything into the game anymore that we intended"?"Hardware limitations" is such a bullshit excuse.

And saying "we couldn't fit these ideas into the game anymore" or "deadline issues" is no more comlicated or harder to understand than "hardware limitations".

Don't they also love to claim this when it comes to art styles?"Super Mario Bros." looks more primitive than "Shatterhand" due to the hardware limitations of the time.Sure, because placing the pixels in a way so that they form the shape of the "Shatterhand" guy requires a specific mapper. NROM cartridges are not capable of holding sprites with small heads and black outlines.

Originally in Donkey Kong, he is a carpenter. I'm also fairly sure he was inspired by a real italian carpenter named Mario working at Nintendo's building but I might be misremembering. He only became a plumber in Mario Bros.

Quote:

If you only saw frames 1-3 and 5, then this might be interpreted as Mario punching Yoshi on the head. But Frame 4 shows that Mario's hand and Yoshi's head are on a completely different position of the z-axis.

The content of individual frames is meaningless if they're only shown a fraction of a second on the screen. If what you see by seeing the animation as a whole is Mario punching Yoshi, then it's an animation of Mario punching Yoshi. The fact that if you pause on one specific frame you can see he is punching the air next to Yoshi's head instead is a mere trivia, as you don't see it when the animation is playing.

"Primitive" can be interpreted in different ways. When talking about NROM primitivity, the design choice is such that you must fit the entirety of the game graphics inside 8kB:s, so naturally, you draw graphics in a way that can be easily reused throughout all levels, scenes, menus etc, especially in a game that's as long (NROM-relatively speaking) as SMB1. I think talking about outlines and "good"/"bad" pixel art here can be a bit misleading.

I won't deny that there was a certain fashion around the time up to SMB1, though, which later got replaced by the more comics/cartoon-inspired outline style.

I wouldn't say referring to "hardware limitations" is BS (it depends on intention), but it's all too easy to misinterpret as "the machine can't do that" if you aren't a developer yourself, when the truth is you have a cake and can split it into slices however you'd like, but you can't make the cake bigger.

Ultimately, the PPU:s restrictions would/will play into the choice of having something ride something else. I'm personally struggling with that for our blaster/metroidy game project, where the solution is keeping things a bit smaller in size. I also had that "problem" for our iced dino riding/running minigame, where the thought of solution was to keep sprite-based obstacles strictly choreographed in appearance (no more than this or that appearing at this or that height at the same time) and drawing the dino so that the player character sprite count at the "ground" level was low enough. Either case, having a metasprite ride another metasprite with some sort of layering will have repercussions on the rest of design, so you must make a cut somewhere, be it accepting sprite cancelling / flickering, reducing projectile count, designing enemy movement patterns a certain way but not another, and so on.

And in the case of SMB1 having a dino to ride on... what would you cut out from the sprite sheet in order to fit that enormous ostrich and/or pterodactyl?

The content of individual frames is meaningless if they're only shown a fraction of a second on the screen. If what you see by seeing the animation as a whole is Mario punching Yoshi, then it's an animation of Mario punching Yoshi. The fact that if you pause on one specific frame you can see he is punching the air next to Yoshi's head instead is a mere trivia, as you don't see it when the animation is playing.

That's nonsense. Since when is the human eye the basis for what's true?

"The suspect wasn't at the crime scene. Sure, you found skin particles. But you only found them with a technical device. Since you couldn't see them with your plain eyes, this means they were not really there."

"The fact that the ball was in the goal for the fraction of a second can only be seen on video. Therefore, it never happened."

An animation was drawn by an artist frame-by-frame. It's not an automatically-generated picture created by combining two key frames. Hence, what is in those frames is really there. And if Mario's fist is next to Yoshi's head, you cannot claim that this doesn't count because you can only see it when slowing down the image.

That's nonsense. Since when is the human eye the basis for what's true?

Since animation, at least. The whole thing about animation is tricking the eye and getting away with it. I think i agree with Bregalad. It's not about any specific frame. It's about the change and movement between frames during playback and how they are percieved on average. Though, if mario's really supposed to hit yoshi and that was what they intended with those frames, it looks pretty sloppy when examined.

Ultimately, it's all up to every viewer to decode - i percieve mario as making a gesture like he means to say "get that for me, yoshi".

That's nonsense. Since when is the human eye the basis for what's true?[...]An animation was drawn by an artist frame-by-frame. It's not an automatically-generated picture created by combining two key frames. Hence, what is in those frames is really there. And if Mario's fist is next to Yoshi's head, you cannot claim that this doesn't count because you can only see it when slowing down the image.

You get a point, the 4th frame can be proof that the animator didn't intend to have Mario punching Yoshi. However, the animation as a whole still looks like Mario is punching Yoshi, so if the intent was something else, it went really poorly on the way, and I'm glad they changed it.

Now that makes the trivia "Mario was originally going to punch Yoshi" technically wrong, the real fact being that "Mario was originally looking like he was punching Yoshi, and this looked bad, so we changed it".

Don't they also love to claim this when it comes to art styles?"Super Mario Bros." looks more primitive than "Shatterhand" due to the hardware limitations of the time.Sure, because placing the pixels in a way so that they form the shape of the "Shatterhand" guy requires a specific mapper. NROM cartridges are not capable of holding sprites with small heads and black outlines.

I get where you're coming from, and I agree. But that said, there are major differences between the two games that make a pretty big impact. Shatterhand relies heavily on bankswitching, and will switch in smaller parts of the sprite side of CHR-ROM dynamically several times throughout a single stage, to fit in new enemies, which allows way more frames on animations, compared to SMB having two frames for every walk cycle in the game. In fact, Shatterhand bankswitches the main character entirely for each different animation he can do. No wonder that game is so much more lush with content and animation compared to SMB, which spans 32 stages full of every different kind of enemy, powerup, etc. in a single 8KB CHR-ROM.

That said, I always thought SMB had fairly ugly graphics. It could have looked much better with a better art style, but the same amount of CHR data. I don't think anyone working on the game was really computer artists in the same sense you'd have later on. I'm not even sure who designed the sprites? Miyamoto himself? They probably didn't really have graphical tools to design the sprites either, but had to sketch them out on paper. I'm just guessing here, but I think it sounds likely.

This doesn't prove anything... Synchronization errors in object animations happen all the time. If you look at Sonic games frame by frame there are numerous instances of delayed impact on things like springs, enemies and such. This is not surprising, considering that different objects normally have their own frame counters, and the exact moment when state changes occur or the order in which the objects are updated could easily result in off by one errors, that are unnoticeable in real time.

This effect may even be intentional in some cases. In traditional animation, much like in video games, there are usually less actual drawings than frames per second, so alternating the animations of characters in the same scene is a cheap way to improve the overall perception of smoothness, because something will change every frame.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 16 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum